Pages

20080727

Voyager Rules!

Not that Voyager, actually. That Voyager had tons of potential and I will admit the first few seasons had their charms. But by the end it was a Space train wreck ending in a Space ditch.

This Voyager, however, is totally awesome and rules by any measure you'd like to use to measure awesomeness.

I have a huge weakness for pictures like this, pictures of perspective. Like Carl Sagan's "Little Blue Dot", these types of pictures almost force you to consider the reality of your existence. The scale of it all, so vast, so incredibly vast and so incredibly small that our lives are what, in comparison? In the scheme of it all.

I mean, look into this picture. See the little solar system spinning around the bright nucleus of the Sun? Our planet is nothing but a single proton in orbit.

Wiki says:"For the first ten billion kilometres of its radius, the solar wind travels at over a million kilometres per hour.[1][2] As it begins to collide with the interstellar medium, it slows to subsonic speeds before finally ceasing altogether. The point where the solar wind becomes subsonic is the termination shock; the point where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance is called the heliopause; the point where the interstellar medium, travelling in the opposite direction, becomes subsonic as it collides with the heliosphere is the bow shock."

This is our cellular membrane, shielding us from the worst of the vast expanse between us and the next cell.